Lex Brown: Defense Mechanisms
Lex Brown: Defense Mechanisms, 2021, installation view, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
July 23–October 9, 2021
Lex Brown is an artist, musician, and writer. Her work is informed by the omnipresence of media and how its images condition our bodies and language in the information age. Brown builds new characters and expansive fictional worlds in order to untangle the politicized language that builds our world. Fluctuating between humor and seriousness, the work opens up a space for spirited examination, often drawing on current and historical events.
Defense Mechanisms brings together new works in drawing, print, sculpture and video centered around the primary themes of her work: the characterization of commerce and control in contrast with inner transformation and freedom.
Throughout the works are references to Omnesia, a fictional media conglomerate of Brown’s creation. Characters like Aspen Van Der Baas, a gen-something girlboss, and Jordie, her techie right hand render this world in a dark but silly satire as they attempt to dislocate the people in New Greater Framingham with assistance from their AI, Silvy. In the midst of this battleground emerges the voice of deeper consciousness, a call, an instruction, to reorganize a power within.
For Brown, Defense Mechanisms has been shaped by her reflections upon her own “defense mechanisms” which became extra apparent during quarantine. She says of the exhibition, “In many ways, this body of work is like turning over the hourglass. The work feels familiar and foundational. It comes from an accumulation of energy, skills, feelings, and ideas that lived in me for a long time but hadn’t coalesced until now. At the same time, it feels like starting the clock again, through collaborative image-making processes that are completely new to my practice.”
Humor as a Tool ESSAY
Communication: Lex Brown vs. Space Capital
“There is a well-worn story about the future that goes something like this: as humanity reaches a crisis, technology comes to the rescue. As technology moves forward, it is bound to push ‘mankind’ to the stars. What’s more, as this happens, new machines will remedy the social ills apparent today.”
Full Video
Exhibition Images
About the Artist:
Brown has performed and exhibited work at the New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, Recess, and The Kitchen in New York; REDCAT Theater and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore; and at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. She holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (AB). Consciousness, a survey of Brown's work spanning the past 8 years, is in the collections of the Whitney, MoMA, and Met museums. It is available in a limited, hand-bound edition from GenderFail Press. Her first paperback work in fiction, My Wet Hot Drone Summer (Badlands Unlimited), a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, is available by request. Brown teaches at Harvard University as a College Fellow in Theater Dance & Media and Art, Film & Visual Studies; and at Princeton University as a Lecturer in Visual Arts.
Supported by:
The series Humor as a Tool is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; administered by Arts Services Initiative of Western New York.
